


Etta's Song

by Elialys



Category: Fringe
Genre: Child Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family, Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 20:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5757397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elialys/pseuds/Elialys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 5x08 story. "She stares at her husband's back now, his head hanging low, his shoulders slumped as his fingers slowly move on the keyboard, the sounds barely muffled by his left foot pressing down on one of the pedals. She stares, and it feels all wrong. Something crucial is missing from his side."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Etta's Song

The distant, quiet notes of the piano do not wake Olivia; Peter's absence from the room does.

She simply lies there in her cramped bed for a few (minutes) moments, her eyes progressively adjusting to the darkness as she stares blankly at the wall. She lets the familiar heaviness settle in every inch of her body, not even trying to fight off the feeling. Eventually, she will get up. Not yet.

It remains one of the hardest things to do these days. Get moving. Once she's up and about, she usually finds a way to keep herself busy quickly enough, finds something to occupy her thoughts, keep her mind off (Etta) the pain. But the transition is hard.

And so she stares at the flaking paint, at that crack on the wall right at her eye level, in which she sometimes wishes she could disappear. Now that she's fully awake, she hears the music more clearly, coming from the main part of the lab.

Given their current situation, the sound alone is ludicrous. Someone else might have dismissed it as an auditory hallucination; she doesn't. She's acutely aware of her husband's absence, letting her know he's the one playing. An odd fact for sure, but not entirely surprising either. Their group of fugitives isn't exactly skilled when it comes to being "low-key".

For one thing, Walter often plays some of his old records, loudly, despite Astrid's regular attempts at convincing him of how dangerous it is.

_"How many times do I need to tell you, Alistair. This lab has been fully soundproofed since the '80s. Belly and I thought the Dean might not let us stay if students started complaining about the screaming."_

Walter's eccentricities are one thing. Knowing that the current music comes from Peter is more…unusual.

Olivia forces herself to roll over and sit up, trying to breathe some energy back into her limbs. The thought of drinking a cup of steaming dark coffee briefly crosses her mind, but she pushes it away. Thinking about coffee leads to memories of coffee tablets offered by her twenty-four year old daughter.

Or to more distant memories that involved pretending to be asleep until she heard her little girl's footsteps coming back into their room, closely followed by Peter's, who was in charge of carrying the breakfast tray.

She always smelled the coffee first, but only cared about Etta's scent, as she scooped her into bed and peppered her face with kisses.

Olivia reopens her eyes, having failed to keep the images at bay. Her gaze falls upon Peter's empty bed, a sight that has become as familiar as the ache now spreading like poison throughout her body. She almost always wakes up alone, now, finding him gone, isolated somewhere in his grief. The situation has improved significantly since she managed to convince him to rid himself of the Observer tech, but some things remain unchanged.

He still barely sleeps. He blames his migraines, but there is more to it. She can't help thinking that if they shared the same bed, shared comfort and warmth, he would find rest more easily. She knows she would. The only reason why she sleeps so much these days is because sleep is the only effective way to escape her own head for a while.

But she craves her husband, when she lies alone in bed, in ways that have nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with missing him, missing  _her_ , and needing him there with her.

She can't exactly complain about their precarious sleeping arrangement, but she worries about him, no matter what. She worries about him much more than she ever worries about her own well-being, another unwavering aspect of their relationship. Today, it is her concern for him more than his unexpected playing that finally gets her up and moving.

She quickly and quietly navigates within the labyrinth they (Astrid) have carved within the amber these past few weeks, her thoughts on the instrument itself.

She wonders how it could have survived over twenty years in amber; they've gotten much better at melting it and freeing various objects from it, but there's a rather massive difference between a small rectangular tape, and a piano made of dozens of strings –among other things.

This question answers itself when she finally reaches it –and him, exactly where she remembered the piano being from all these years ago, a much happier lifetime ago. The amber had never reached this part of the lab, having stopped its progression only feet away from the instrument, the tunnel opening up to it.

She also spots the dark shape of the thick cover that used to hide it from view, now sprawled on the ground. Walter had been the one to conceal it, sometimes after Etta's (first) disappearance; no one had needed to ask him why.

Olivia never was a musician herself, having therefore rarely played it, but Peter and Etta had  _loved_  that piano.

She stares at her husband's back now, his head hanging low, his shoulders slumped as his fingers slowly move on the keyboard, the sounds barely muffled by his left foot pressing down on one of the pedals. She stares, and it feels all wrong. Something crucial is missing from his side.

Even though the small child who once sat next to him is long gone, long before she died in their arms, Olivia sees her ghost.

Etta wasn't even eighteen months old the first time she pulled herself up onto that bench; having learned to walk months ago, her newest and most sought out occupation at the time had been to climb on everything she could get her hands and knees on, to her parents' desperation. By then, the lab had long been childproofed –as much as a lab could be childproofed- but no one had given a thought to the piano.

Instead of climbing from the bench onto the instrument itself, she had stopped when her palms first met the keys, startled by the loud, discordant sounds she had accidently produced. The surprise would have made more than one child cry, but true to herself, Etta reacted with fascination and delight instead.

Every adult present in the room at the time had rushed over at the sound of the piano, expecting to find her on top of it by now. But she hadn't moved, still pushed up on her knees, her chubby fingers pressed upon the keys. She had offered her parents a mostly toothless, drooling grin, before both her hands started hitting the keyboard with enthusiasm.

Peter had joined her within moments. She didn't have time to protest when he picked her up, as he quickly took her place on the bench, their daughter now sitting on his lap. He started playing right away, a jazzy version of " _The Wheels on the Bus_ ", her favorite; Etta had been thrilled, squealing with glee.

As she grew older, she eventually came to sit on the bench next to Peter instead of on his lap, as he taught her a few easy notes. He had gone as far as creating their own little melody _. Etta's Song_ , their daughter called it. Peter played it on the lower keys with his left hand, while Etta's right and left pointy fingers pushed a few well-known notes on the higher keys.

Tonight, Olivia recognizes the melody, although she can tell it's slightly different; he's playing with both hands, for one thing, and somehow, he's changing enough notes to make it sound sadder than it used to be.

Silently, she joins him, coming to sit where Etta would have sat. She doesn't say a word, wrapping an arm around his waist, pressing her cheek to his shoulder. She watches his hands for a while as he plays the song in a loop, familiar in both sounds and movements despite his alterations, the notes echoing inside her chest.

When her free hand reaches out for the piano almost of its own accord, she doesn't stop herself, her fingers soon pressing the keys Etta would have pressed, at a higher octave. No, she was never a musician, but she'd watched her two loves play this often enough for her to have memorized it all.

Music is a succession of patterns, after all, and her brain always thrived on patterns.

Together, they play  _Etta's Son_ g a few times, Peter soon dropping his right hand, letting Olivia's fingers move back to the center of the piano, where they're supposed to be, while his left hand reverts to the original melody.

His sad notes make place to their happier counterparts, and before long, the song is as it used to be, beautiful, simple, and warm.

Peter's hand slips, eventually, abruptly stopping the melody.

With her arm still around him, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, she feels the tension in his muscles, feels and hears his next intakes of breath, labored and loud as he fights against his pain. She tightens her hold on him, her own eyes now shut as the same pain resonates through her, feeling his tremors under her palm; he's shaking, the way he was only days ago on that balcony.

Their next movements are both soundless and innate. This is as familiar to them as their baby's song, seeking the other out and  _clinging_. Soon, his face is nestled against her neck, her fingers in his hair, her heart pounding in her chest and against her ears, her throat constricted with grief.  _This_ , the two of them, used to be enough. They both know it's not anymore.

It's not enough, because they used to be  _three_. They were three longer than they were two. Together, they had been a couple.

With Etta, they were a family.

The relationship Peter had with their daughter was different from the one Olivia had with her, just like it was different from the one the two of them had together. But these pieces fit; a perfect symbiosis.

Without her, that balance had disappeared.

Olivia suspects this is one of the reasons why they'd failed so spectacularly to be there for one another after her disappearance, why they were barely able to be around each other. It made them all too aware of what was truly missing.

Sitting there at this piano without their little girl, they both feel it, that gash, the missing part of their equation. It isn't a void, though.

It's not  _emptiness_.

It's the deep, deep ache of a love that will never fade.

_The pain is her legacy to you both. It's proof that she was here._


End file.
